Western utilities beware: Coal is a risky
business

It wasn’t long ago that
I got one of those flyers about rates that comes with my bill from
Xcel Energy, formerly Public Service Co. and now one of the
country’s largest utilities, serving much of Colorado and
several other Western states.

I knew that Xcel was
planning on building a huge and expensive coal-fired power plant in
Pueblo, Colo., so instead of pitching it, I read the flyer avidly.
Like many Westerners, I was already seeing the signs of climate
change all around me: Declining snow pack, drought, miserable
summer heat, struggling farmers, hard-to-stop forest fires and
millions of dead and dying trees.

It seemed clear to me
that building a large coal-fired power plant would further
accelerate climate change. So why do it?

To add insult to
injury, the flyer informed me that Excel Energy planned to increase
everyone’s rates to pay for the new plant, bypassing
conventional financing.

The brochure did have a picture
of some cute children on the cover and it stated that I could file
a written intervention by a certain date if I had objections. I
certainly had objections, having read major scientific reports on
climate change and its impacts, so I filed what is called a
"Petition to Intervene" with the Colorado Public Utilities
Commission.

I had a sense that our very pro-coal
commission wasn’t going to want to listen to concerns about
climate change, so I was careful to emphasize a different issue:
money. I warned that at this point in our understanding of climate
change, building a 750 megawatt coal-fired power plant was likely
to lead to large legal and regulatory costs in the future.

I said that, though Americans have been the subject of a
massive disinformation campaign that says the science is unclear,
the overwhelming scientific consensus is that climate change is
real, that it is caused by emissions of greenhouse gases —
especially carbon dioxide — and that the consequences are
serious and will go on for centuries.

While foot-dragging
persists, this consensus is likely to be punishing for companies
that persist in building carbon dioxide-emitting coal plants. As
was the case with tobacco, once the science is well enough
established, lawsuits are not far behind.

That’s
what I wrote, and the next thing I knew, I was in the hearing room
in Denver of the Public Utilities Commission, intending to listen
to the first pre-hearing conference on Xcel’s proposals to
build a coal-fired power plant and to increase our rates to pay for
it.

I hadn’t listened for long when the Public
Utilities Commission chairman, Gregory Sopkin, singled me out.
Sternly, he said the Public Utilities Commission was not going to
be considering climate change during the proceedings, and that I
should not engage in an exercise in futility.

I responded
as well as I could, but Chairman Sopkin was clearly not interested
in listening. He told me that my petition to intervene had been
rejected and I no longer had the right to speak in the hearings. I
was not intimidated, but I was shocked by the brusque tone, and
judging by other people’s faces, they were taken aback, too.

It wasn’t many weeks after that that my prediction
about lawsuits came true. On July 21, Attorney General Eliot
Spitzer of New York and the attorneys general of seven other states
sued Xcel Energy and four other utilities over their carbon dioxide
emissions at 174 fossil-fuel burning power plants. They said these
plants produce 10 percent of the United States output of carbon
dioxide, the primary cause of global warming.

I
haven’t gotten an apology from Chairman Sopkin, but the
obvious bias of the Public Utilities Commission is helping to
mobilize opposition to the new power plant in Pueblo. And though
Xcel Energy and other power companies seem loath to admit it, the
proposal to build more coal-fired power plants is likely to run
into strong opposition,

Many citizens like me know
there’s another path to follow. We know that renewable energy
and aggressive demand side-efficiency programs are the better and
cheaper way to meet the energy demands of the West. It’s long
past time for Xcel and Colorado’s Public Utility Commission
to wise up, too.

Leslie Glustrom is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). She is a
climate change activist living in Boulder,
Colorado.

Note: the opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of High Country News, its board or staff. If you'd like to share an opinion piece of your own, please write Betsy Marston at betsym@hcn.org.